This invention relates generally to accessing relational databases on networks to provide cached information to a client browser.
Increasingly, data is cached on a server and accessed by clients over the Internet. This decreases the resource requirements on the client while providing ready access to the information with a sufficiently high speed Internet connection. Conventionally, when the client needs information (such as the address of a web site that has been bookmarked), the browser resident on the client formulates a request and transmits it over the Internet to a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) server. The server then transmits the request to a relational database management server over a common gateway interface (CGI) program. Each time the relational database management server is accessed, a new connection and a new session to that server must be established.
Referring to FIG. 3, the establishment of such a connection and a session is somewhat time consuming and needlessly bogs down the processing of the relational database management server. The request from the browser must be decoded as indicated in block 48. Then, a Structured Query Language (SQL) query must be parsed from other information such as the HTTP server""s uniform resource locator (URL) (block 50). The relational database management server then must bind the program variables as indicated in block 52. The relational database management server executes the query as indicated in block,54. Thereafter, the relational database management server must fetch the results as indicated in block 56.
Generally, access by the browser is stateless. The term xe2x80x9cstatelessxe2x80x9d refers to a process that participates in an activity without monitoring all the details of its state and particularly is not aware of the context of a given process. Because of the stateless character of the browser""s request, it is difficult to maintain any type of caching mechanism on the server side.
Therefore, there is a need for a more efficient way to handle stateless accesses to a relational database management server from an Internet browser.